Books, Mud and Compost. And Horses.

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I’m taking a slightly different tack here to my usual
interviews-with-authors, and interviewing a photographer, Deanne Ward, who
specialises in horses and dogs. I happen to know this particular photographer,
and have done since we were horse-mad girls at school together, made felt
ponies together, had model pony gymkhanas, rode real ponies …. and now, after
detours for both of us, we’re both working with horses, although Deanne gets
closer up than me. You’ll see just how close in a bit.

And so, one sunny May morning, Deanne came to visit, armed
with her photography equipment. I provided tea, an elderly Labrador who made
sure Deanne spilled that tea over her lap, and who then, having been virtually
comatose up to the point of having her photo done, decided she was going to
prove just how good Deanne is at working with animals who, well, are just not
feeling it. JB: Welcome to my
blog Deanne – so, how did you get started – have you always been keen on
photography?
DW: Well, I actually st…

Did you have any of these, I wonder? The books you knew existed, because you'd seen them mentioned on the dustjackets of books you had read, but which you never managed to track down? Gillian Baxter fell into that category for me. Not one did I manage to find, not a single one until Louise Simmonds started Ozbek Books, selling vintage pony literature. Through her, at the advanced age of 40+, I finally found Gillian Baxter. She was well worth the wait. A few years after that, I interviewed Gillian, who's still involved in the horse world, and is still writing

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When you write pony books, it makes life much easier if you have ponies trotting through your own consciousness: the Black Boy you learned to ride on, or the evil Benjamin who dumped you on your first riding lesson. When I talked to her, I was struck by just how many of Gillian Baxter's equine characters were based on her own horses and ponies. Her books are full of ponies she has known or owned.

It's been a while since I did an interview, but knowing Kate Cuthbert had released For the Love of Fly has sparked me into action. The book's had a long journey to publication. When Kate first got in touch with me, a publisher had just decided that the mixture of horses and school wouldn't work for today's children. I worked on the story with Kate (and on book number two), and she's now brought it out as a paperback.

Today, I talk to Kate about why she thinks combining horses and school does work, and on how she's got to publication.
*** JB: Welcome Kate! It's good to have you on the blog. First things first: how did you start writing?
I enjoyed writing when I was younger. I used to write stories set in a stable yard and I would draw out a map of the yard to go with it, writing a horse’s name into each little square that represented a stable. As I got older I followed a more scientific path, eventually gaining BSc and MSc degrees, and, because of this, I con…

In most towns and cities, you can probably, if you look hard
enough, find evidence of the working horse, even if it’s just in the names of
streets. And although many buildings have disappeared entirely, some still
survive, even if they have found other uses entirely.
One such is the railway stables that served the goods yards
of Euston Station and the surrounding canals. Inner city stables like these housed an
astonishing number of horses, often in surprisingly small spaces. If you are
used to the open spaces of most modern yards, it’s difficult to imagine that
once hundreds of horses were stabled around Chalk Farm Road, in what has become
known as Camden Stables. At its peak, the goods stables housed 700–800 horses, with more
stables at the termini for those horses who transported passengers.
The first run of stables was built in 1839, but they and the
surrounding buildings saw decades of expansion and rebuilding. The earliest range
of stables that still survives today was built in …

There are some wonderful pony book covers out there, and then there are the ones that stick in your mind for all the wrong reasons.

The original hardback edition of Gillian Baxter's Horses in the Glen had a prettycover by Elisabeth Grant. The Children's Book Club edition had something copied, rather badly, from Mathilde Windisch-Graetz's The Spanish Riding School.

The Children's Book Club had form for producing iffy covers. Here is their version of Monica Dickens's Cobbler's Dream (which arguably is not a children's book anyway – or at least only for a child with a strong stomach). The Michael Joseph first edition is infinitely better.

Possibly the most glorious Children's Book Club effort is this one, for Monica Edwards's The Wanderer, which does make you wonder if the illustrator had ever seen an actual horse.

Fortunately the original artist, Joan Wanklyn, had.

Scholastic Book Services (who, like the Children's Book Club, did also produce som…